Get This Book: The Sex Myth, by Rachel Hills

I like reading about sex; throw in thoughtful analysis of sex and gender, and I'm hooked. Include a good mix of anecdotal stories and scientific analysis, and I'm in for the duration. Rachel Hills' The Sex Myth does a fine job of delving into our predilection to think that we know just what the sex lives of others are like, and just how wrong we often are. In particular, she's shining some light on the post-sexual-revolution tendency to insist that people be having the kinky, frequent sex that we have all been told is within everybody's reach. 

For me, her discussion of how men are affected by sexual stereotypes about men was the most interesting chapter. She starts off by taking us into a frat house in the U.S.--a move which I quickly criticized as myopic in the margin of the book. Hills is too smart to fall into such a trap, however, and is bringing us there because these men are doing their best to rail against the stereotypes, with part of their manifesto urging respect toward women. And it's "Christopher", one of the fraternity men, who says some things that are so rarely heard from men in our culture:

"In ever sexual relationship I have had with a woman, I have felt pressured to do more than I am comfortable with," Christopher says. Sometimes taht pressure has come directly from the women he's dating, other times from some internalized ideal of how guys "should" approach sex.  He recalls a night he spent watching movies on the couch with his first girlfriend when he was fifteen.  "I was quite happy to just kiss, but I remember feeling this pressure to initiate something more.  You're alone and she turned off the lights, so I guess that means you're supposed to take it further."

And after a few more anecdotes, Hills gives us some facts:

A 2010 survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Seventeen magazine found that 21 percent of fifteen-to-twenty-two-year-old guys had been pressured by a female peer to go further sexually than they wanted to, with more than three-quarters (78 percent) agreeing that there was "way too much pressure" to have sex.  Fifty-six percent said they were "relieved" when a female partner wanted to wait to have sex." 

And this is the strength of Hills' book, for me--there is a well-done mixing of personal stories and more generalized facts about our sex lives.  And despite the intricate discussion at hand, Hills manages to write in an almost breezy tone about some really serious issues. The Sex Myth feels something like a discussion among friends, rather than a polemic. 

One quibble I have with the book is that it skews fairly heterocentric. She does obviously make an effort to leave a lot of the discussion as sexual-preference-neutral, and there are queer people quoted in the book, but one can't help but wonder how many of the fraternity guys were really concerned about being pressured into sex by other men, for instance. But this is just a quibble, and it actually speaks to a strength of the book for me: This book feels like the interesting beginning of a conversation that we all should be having.

Links:
The Sex Myth at the publisher.
Rachel Hills 
Twitter
buy the book at Indiebound
NYT review

Full disclosure: I was provided with a review copy of the book, for which I'm grateful.

Grateful for Female Friends

Found myself this week feeling especially grateful for all of the female friends I currently have in my life, and also for the female friends I had growing up. Been thinking a bit about it because of two stories that dug deep into my brain: Gus Van Sant's film Paranoid Park, and the graphic novel Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, by Percy Carey, wherein the male protagonists seem almost wholly separated from women as friends.

Paranoid Park is a fictional account of a white, middle class high-school skater boy navigating not only his parents' divorce, but also the aftereffects of a severe trauma. No spoilers here, but he is surrounded mostly by his male skater friends, who aren't particularly good at even noticing he's been through a trauma, and who respond to any deviations from traditional masculinity by wondering if somebody "is a faggo".   The only girls his age in the film he interacts with are his girlfriend, who really only sees him as something of a fashion accessory, and a friend-who-is-obviously-smitten-with-him that he mostly blows off. (To be fair, this second girl is one of the only positive influences in his life.) The movie does a good job of conveying the isolation he feels because of the secret he doesn't feel he can divulge, but also the basic isolation that kids growing up can feel--and especially focuses on the isolation boys feel as they try to fit into the straight jacket of traditional masculinity. 


Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm is a beautifully illustrated autobiographical comic about Percy Carey, otherwise known as MF Grimm, who was/is a hip-hop star of some renown. (Carey is now president of Arch Enemy, a comic company that puts out some interesting stuff, which goes to show this man knows how to create success in just about whatever he does.) He pulls no punches in the telling of his story (and his story includes a lot of literal punches), and my favorite aspect of his writing was that he sets the tone by explicitly laying out some of the culture he was immersed in to those of us who might not be familiar with it-- the culture of a not well-off black kid in the United States. One of the only women he talks about in the book, his mother, is central to the story of his life: She always has his back, and is the central person in his life who teaches him to take shit from no one. (The scene where she punches out a stranger who pinches her ass was one of the best parts of the book, if also heartbreaking.) But that one page on his mom, with the exception of a few words about his grandmother's death, is basically the only time any relationships with women are talked about. Carey seems to have lived a life among men, to the extent that almost all of the formative moments he has chosen to tell about were about the men in his life. If he had friends who were women, he left them out of this book. 

Which brings me to what I have always been grateful for, but feel more strongly these days: All of my female friends. A few of them are ex-girlfriends, but most of them are just people I clicked with on some level, and they have offered me (as I look back) lenses through which to look at the world that I would never have had access to if I had kept my friendship circle to mostly men. Sure, as a man who is romantically interested in women, sometimes friendships with women are sometimes more...complex. There's the sentiment, which I learned from When Harry Met Sally, that men want to sleep with all of their women friends:



And of course this sentiment isn't limited to movies from the 80s. Here's the same idea, in a relatively modern discussion:



To whatever extent that stereotype may hold true, I'd say it's partly because we don't encourage men to be "just" friends with women. ("Just"--because somehow friendship is less-than romantic relationships?) There are too few blueprints for and examples of mixed-gender friendships, especially among straight folks.  

So a thank you to all of my women friends, past, present, and future. 

UNICORN!

Rachel Kramer Bussel's Best Sex Writing 2013 is a particularly strong member of the pretty solid series where folks write about sex.  This edition has some of my favorite folks writing about sex (Patrick Califia, Melissa Gira Grant, and Madison Young!), but the piece I thought readers of this blog might be most interested in is Seth Fischer's Notes from a Unicorn, a memoir piece about being a bi-identified man.

Fischer's piece runs the gamut from sweetly comic to heartrendingly tragic.  He covers the traditional responses that bi-folks have to deal with upon coming out ("I don't believe in that! You're just not ready to come out as gay yet!"), and shows with personal experiences just how much harm such responses cause:

A year later, I sat at my desk with a knife, poking at my wrist. I had an impossible crush on a boy. Frank Martin and I were on the same basketball team. His locker was two over from mine, and I couldn’t help it—I was twelve or thirteen years old. I had twenty boners a day. It’s just the way it was—so when he changed, I kept sneaking a peek because I just wanted to see, because I could smell him, and it was amazing, and was it too much to smell and see?

And he caught me looking. But when he caught me, he wouldn’t look right back at me. Instead, he looked at the locker in front of him, and said, quiet enough so no one would hear, “I don’t give a fuck if you’re gay. I know it’s not your fault, but you better not fucking look at me like that ever again.”

I decided that day that I would choose to grow the part of me that liked women and kill the part that liked men. I poked at little parts of my wrist until they turned bright red, then I pulled the blade up and watched my skin turn back to its normal color, and then I pressed down again harder. But I couldn’t make myself do it hard enough, because I couldn’t stand blood, because I was too afraid to die right then. I tried to spell out words with the little red dots but they disappeared too quickly. I tried to spell out Frank. I tried to spell out tired. I took out a pack of stolen Kools and snuck outside and smoked cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.

Like several bi- or queer-identified folks that I know, Fischer even tried to convince himself that he was gay, since so many people kept telling him that was the only real possibility. Really, this article is worth the price of the book. 

What does this have to do with feminism?  I think that at least some of the difficulties that are thrust upon bi folks in general, and bi men in particular, are directly related to outdated notions of sex and gender norms.  (Of course, a lot of people reject "bi" as embracing traditional gender norms, and opt for a "queer" identification instead.)  And some feminisms are clearly pointing out that these sex and gender norms are often bogus, and aren't seen to be as malleable as they, in fact, are. 

 Fischer's heartfelt stories sadly show that both gay-identified folks and straight-identified folks are buying in to some of the traditional sex and gender roles when they reject the idea outright that anybody could be bi-identified. Stories of our actual lives are so powerful--how could anybody read this piece and still say "I don't believe in that" when someone they know comes out as bi?

Full disclosure:  I was asked by Cleis Press if I would consider promoting this book. I am totally happy to, since I was reading it anyway, and would have likely put something up about it in any case!

Some linky goodness:
Find the book at Cleis Press:

Goodreads

Amazon

BSW2013 website 

Rachel's personal website 

Pink Gun Oil

NOTE: Pretty much every link in this post is NSFW.

If you're not reading Erika Moen's new sex-toy review comic, Oh Joy, Sex Toy, you're missing out. (And, of course, if you haven't read her original memoir comic, DAR, you're doubly missing out.)  She recently reviewed her favorite lube, Pink Lube. Lube is a tricky, personal thing, and it was interesting to read about how much she likes this particular one.  One of Moen's strengths as a writer, especially as a person who writes about sex, is that she is fairly inclusive of various sexualities, genders, races, and body types, and she doesn't disappoint in her new comic about Pink lube.  But I'm not here to talk about how rad Erika Moen is--that would take up too much time.

I'm simply fascinated by the gendered marketing involved.  I went to the Pink site that she linked to (hey look, the comic WORKS, advertisers!), looked around a bit, and discovered that Pink is owned by Empowered Products, which also has a line of products marketed as Gun Oil.  Pink = for women, Gun Oil = for men.  Got it?  









Comparing the sites is a fascinating exercise in gendered advertising.



The logos:

The "Company Story":

PINK

COMPANY PROFILE

Founded in 2001, Pink was created by Empowered Products Inc, an international sexual health and wellness company. Using the feedback and life experience of women, Pink was designed to offer a unique line of intimate lubricants that could be used safely and effectively by women who desired added lubrication for intercourse, toys and foreplay, and also to provide products women could feel confident and eager to use to increase intimacy with their partners or for their own personal pleasure. From intimate lubricants to arousal enhancers, Pink provides a selection of differing weights and uses of lubricants, so each woman can find the one that best meets the needs of her body. All Pink product packaging is presented in stylish feminine bottles that complement the bedroom and invite use by both partners.

 GUN OIL (TOP SECRET)

Following a return from Kuwait, U.S. Marine platoon leader and founder of GUN OIL recalled soldiers using CLP liquid, that keeps firearms and other weapons clean and firing accurately, as a perfect personal lubricant when relief, better known as masturbation, was necessary to relieve stress. Knowing of CLP's long lasting properties, the founder greatly improved on this concept by changing the ingredients to a hypoallergenic, topically safe, user-friendly formula, ideally suited for heightening sexual pleasure when used for intercourse or personal use.

Working closely with scientists to come up with precisely the right look and feel, this team formulated a selection of unsurpassed GUN OIL products that always deliver a highly satisfying experience and elevate the vital expression of masculine fulfillment.

 I love that the "story" of the company for Gun Oil is about ONE MAN creating a company, and the story about Pink is that it was created FOR women, using "feedback and life experience from women".  At least the company story explains (kinda?) how lube for sex = GUNS. The sexualized-military stuff isn't hot for me, though I understand that I may not be their intended audience--it should be noted that Gun Oil is often marketed toward gay men (though this isn't really the case on their site).

 Also, apparently women want "education"...

While men want "Tecnical FAQs":

I'm not really bagging on Empowered Products --sounds like they make some awesome lube, and are marketing it toward men and women in the way that they think will make them the most money. I'm certain there are women who buy lube from the Gun Oil site (the silicone lube, which seems to be the same product, is available in greater quantities on the Gun Oil site, vs. the Pink site), and it's a positive step in a lot of ways to have lube marketed toward women; used to be lube was something you could mostly buy in a poorly-lit sex store, and now here is a site focused on selling products to women for their own pleasure. Can't complain there.  Also, I'll probably try the Pink lube because I like the packaging better than a big, penis-shaped fake bullet.  But still, I can't help but feel the the company is missing out on a bunch of us who would rather just buy lube.  Smitten Kitten does a good job of this--lube as lube for any gender.  And they sell Gun Oil and Pink lube!  Wouldn't it be cool if we lived in a world where the marketing of this stuff was more often as inclusive as Moen's wonderful comics? 

Feminist Reading: Battling Pornography

There is little that tends to polarize feminist communities more than discussions about pornography.  Carolyn Bronstein has written a fantastic book, Battling Pornography, which gives us an in-depth look at how various feminist movements in the 60's and 70's helped to move pornography "...to the forefront of the American women's movement in the 1980s, singled out by some leading feminists as a key agent of female oppression and celebrated by others as an essential ingredient of sexual liberation."  

My favorite part of Bronstein's book is that it doesn't shy away from the complexities of the issues.  It's a great read; I urge you to go buy it:

Bronstein was kind enough to do a pretty in-depth interview with me, below, about some of the issues that I thought would be of particular interest to readers of this blog.

FA:  First of all, thank you so much for doing this interview, and thank you for writing such a fascinating book. I've done a bit of reading about feminism and pornography, and I had no idea about a lot of the history involved.  Who is the intended audience for this book?

I hope that Battling Pornography will appeal to both academic and popular audiences.  Among academics, I think that American historians and sociologists, especially those specializing in women’s history, the history of gender and sexuality, social movements and popular culture will find the book useful and insightful, and will provide a new context for understanding anti-pornography organizing.  Media studies scholars are also a primary audience for the book, as it emphasizes the representation of women in advertising, television and film, and examines how radical feminists in the 1970s and 1980s tried to challenge the dominant constructions of femininity and masculinity created and reinforced by popular media.  Pornography is of interest to most academic disciplines: psychologists try to elucidate the potential for harmful effects on users; political scientists and legal scholars are interested in citizen and government attempts to restrict its free flow and the scope of the First Amendment in terms of protecting  this type of expression; philosophers debate the moral and ethical questions surrounding exploitation and consent among sex workers, which includes the live actors who appear in adult films and magazines, and on adult websites.  To the extent that pornography has implications for many academic disciplines, I hope that a wide range of scholars will find Battling Pornography to be an informative and engaging resource. 

In terms of a general audience, I expect that the book will draw readership from people with interests in feminism, sexuality, popular media and American history.  I hope that today’s young feminists—the third wavers—will pick up Battling Pornography and will come away with a deeper understanding of the unflagging campaign against sexism in media that the anti-pornography feminists led, and how hard they worked to illuminate and contest a culture of male violence against women, especially rape and battering.  Too many young women have been exposed to caricatures of anti-pornography feminists as anti-sexual manhaters who sought to eradicate all forms of sexual expression, and this stereotype has helped create barriers between older and younger feminists, with the latter coming to perceive themselves as rejecting and overthrowing the sexual puritanism of their foremothers.  One lesson that I hope that readers of Battling Pornography will learn is that the vast majority of anti-pornography feminists opposed violence, not sex.  They saw their work against sexualized media violence as a means of reducing women’s vulnerability to assault by eradicating gender stereotypes of woman as passive victim and man as lustful brute.  They did so in hopes that women might achieve the authentic sexual liberation that the sexual revolution had promised, but had failed to deliver. 

I also hope that feminists who were active in the debate, in either the anti-pornography or pro-sex camp, will read the book and perhaps come away with a better understanding of how those on the other side of the fence interpreted the pornography problem.  Some 30 years after the famous 1982 Barnard Conference that I discuss in the book, the mention of this event (famous for its bitter and public clash between anti-pornography and pro-sex feminists) continues to ignite passion, anger and resentment.  The writer Dorothy Allison has identified Barnard as the place where many feminists “lost our religion,” meaning that the women’s movement ceased to be a safe space where diverse voices and opinions could be heard and respected.  I suppose it’s too much to even hope that Battling Pornography could help heal some of those divisions by giving readers greater insight and context for understanding both sides of the movement, but somehow I do still wish that could happen. 

Finally, I think that the book covers significant ground for anyone who is interested in understanding the contemporary pornography scene, and how and why pornography has become a ubiquitous feature of modern life.  When attempts to control its spread through public education and consciousness raising and new legal approaches failed in the mid-1980s, at the same moment that changes in technology made it possible to pipe unlimited adult material into American homes through video and cable television, the stage was set for a seemingly unstoppable proliferation of pornography in American life.   

Battling Pornography takes a nuanced, complex look at the history of anti-pornography movements, indicating a progression of ideas and how those movements and ideas have led us to the places we are today regarding pornography, popular culture, and feminism.  I take a lot of what you wrote partly as a response to overly-simple critiques on all sides of the issue.  Why do you think we keep finding ourselves continually coming back to critiques that (to oversimplify!) complain that anti-porn folks are prudes and pro-porn folks are pimps/sluts/etc.?  Can knowledge of the history of progression of feminist thought and movements around porn help?

Binary categories are appealing.  They provide a mental shortcut that enables us to organize our thoughts about the social world in predictable and easily accessible ways:  Male or female.  Democrat or Republican.  Anti-porn or pro-sex.  A fellow academic demanded just the other day that I identify myself as one or the other: stand and shoot!  This made me realize how badly we need some new terminology to describe feminists like me who see value in both sets of arguments, and would prefer to weave the positions together in ways that encourage and embrace sexual freedom and pleasure while recognizing that not every sexual act or exchange is transgressive or liberatory just because someone insists that it is.  There is always potential for exploitation in human relationships, and the feminist anti-pornography analysis has much to offer in terms of thinking through global problems like sex trafficking.  I do believe that new histories of anti-pornography and pro-sex organizing like Battling Pornography will reveal the existence of more complex issue positions among feminists, and will point us toward new ways of critiquing sexual harm without abandoning the right of individuals to pursue a diverse, satisfying and unfettered sexual life.

The tone of the book is one of neutrality on the issues, to some extent.  As a feminist, is it harder to be a sociologist/historicist around these issues than it would be around any others?  Did you have any concerns around the "objective" framework, given that there are numerous feminist critiques of such frameworks as patriarchal?

When I began researching the history of the grassroots feminist groups that the book discusses—WAVAW, WAVPM, and WAP—I was surprised at how little had been published about their origins, members and campaigns.  The majority of what I found dealt with WAP from about 1982 onward, and with the MacKinnon-Dworkin anti-pornography ordinances.  So, one purpose in writing Battling Pornography was to document the extraordinary work that these groups did around media violence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to preserve their achievements and enrich the history of late twentieth century American feminism.  But, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the framework is objective because the very nature of my reading and interpreting the groups’ unpublished manuscript collections transforms it into a subjective account.  I  had to make decisions about what events to describe, which activists to highlight, and which ideas to foreground, and in so doing, I brought my own biases and beliefs to the table.  recognize that it was not possible to create an objective account. 

As one reads deeper into the book, I do let my position on the issues be known.  In short, I think that WAVAW had it right:  focus on popular media; subsume pornography under violence, not the other way around; recognize that men and women are both victims of gender stereotypes that glamorize violence, and above all, stick with public education, consciousness raising and consumer action techniques rather than seeking protection from the state.  I write in the book that the movement only became controversial when feminists began emphasizing pornography as the target and started to look at creating new laws.  Countering fierce opposition from free speech advocates, liberals and pro-sex feminists drained movement energy and resources, and hampered activists’ ability to achieve concrete goals. 

Although I periodically introduce my opinion, I purposefully did not make it a central feature of the book.  Most of what is published on the anti-pornography movement has been written by participants or their pro-sex challengers, and takes an explicit position with regard to the correctness (or not) of anti-pornography theory and politics.  I thought the greatest contribution I could make at this time would be to use my critical distance as a non-participant to offer a factual, insightful and empathic account of the movement that shows how the grassroots groups formed and changed over time, why they made certain strategic decisions that led to the anti-pornography emphasis, and how external political, cultural and social factors affected their trajectories.  There is no other book available at this time that gives you a thorough view of the development of the feminist anti-pornography movement.  Given the movement’s lasting impact on American society and American feminism, I thought such a book needed to be written. 

Since this is an "ally" site, I also want to ask: Is there anything in particular that you think men ought to get out of this book, in addition to or different from what women will get out of it?

      One of the most surprising aspects of my research was the discovery that members of the earliest grassroots anti-media violence group, WAVAW, were critically concerned about the well-being of men.  They argued that the glorified images of sexual violence presented in popular media taught men that women secretly liked to be raped, and instilled in them the dangerous idea that a real man was a brute.  Instead of vilifying men, which is something that anti-pornography feminists are uniformly charged with, members of WAVAW believed that men were victims too, systematically warped by media images of maleness.  They decried such images as “crippling” and “maiming” and insisted that they were devastating for both sexes.  This belief in the artificial nature of gender was consistent with radical feminism and the belief that heterosexuality was an institution designed to ensure the continued subordination of women.  Nonetheless, I was surprised by the empathy that members of WAVAW showed for men and the pressure they face even today to conform to social expectations for traditionally masculine behavior.  I think that men who read Battling Pornography might realize that many of these feminists were not anti-male at all.  They opposed depictions of men that normalized violent behavior as expected and desirable. 

Do you have any plans to do another book that leads us up to the present day around these movements, or even makes more analysis of what should/will come next?

This question brought to mind an experience I had in 2004 when I heard John D’Emilio, an outstanding historian of sexuality, give a talk about his book Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America, which had been published the year prior.  When he finished his talk, he opened the floor for Q&A, and as it was ending I asked him to tell us what his next book project might cover.  He gave me a quizzical look and responded that he was still working on Lost Prophet, and that he was not ready to think beyond the book because there was still so much that remained to be done with it.  It is only now, years later, having finished Battling Pornography, that I truly understand what he meant.  Will I write a subsequent book that deals with the pornography problem from 1986 to the present?  Maybe.  First, I have to see where this book takes me.  I won’t know for sure what is next until I see how Battling Pornography is received, how it factors into both academic and popular discussions of the pornography problem, and whether it raises a new set of questions about pornography and society that I had not previously considered.  I can tell you that questions around media representation and women are an enduring intellectual interest for me, and the issue of pornography will remain central to that subject.  

How have pro-porn (or pro-sex-work) feminist folks responded to the book?

The feedback I have had thus far has primarily been from the women’s history and gender studies communities, and has been quite positive.  The book is so new that word is just getting out about its publication, and I might have a more interesting answer for you several months from now.  I think that I make a good case for the pro-sex feminists in Battling Pornography and offer a fair account of their intent to challenge the unremitting focus on sexual danger that they saw in the anti-pornography movement, and their wish to speak about sexuality as a positive force for women in terms of pleasure, agency and self-discovery. 

I hope that feminists who support pornography and sex work will come to understand that the core movement objection was to violence, not sexuality.  I think that some of the modern day adult entertainment that is created with a feminist sensibility in mind would not raise the same set of concerns as mass market male-oriented pornography that is said to exploit women’s bodies and dehumanize both actor and viewer. 

One of the interesting things about the book is that I can see various "sides" choosing to cherry pick from the histories of the movements in order to bolster their causes (I'm thinking here of a thread you point out describing how anti-violence-against-women leaders decided that being anti-porn would help get the word out, for instance--a move that might be characterized by some as taking a cue from Mad Men style of advertising).

Well, I expect that’s always the case with a book published on a hotly contested topic, and pornography certainly qualifies as such.  As an author, I think that you have to write a narrative that makes the best possible case for your point of view, present your evidence clearly, offer what you see as the most logical and persuasive conclusions…and then understand that no two people are going to interpret your text or use it for their own purposes in exactly the same way.  I assume that some readers will come away from Battling Pornography thinking that I am a staunch anti-pornography feminist and that the book proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that we need to mobilize new efforts to pass legislation.  Others will read it and determine that I am a card-carrying member of Samois, a Bay Area lesbian feminist S/M rights organization active in the late 1970s and early 1980s which was a major foe of anti-porn groups.  Given how strongly people feel about the topic, it’s fair to predict that the evidence and arguments in the book may get misrepresented at times to serve other people’s academic or political purposes.  But, if you choose to write a book about pornography, you have to be prepared to enter the fray and live with the consequences.  It’s not a neutral issue.  

On Sex Addiction and Compulsive Sexual Behavior

A recent discussion on The Good Men Project with Tom Matlack and Amanda Marcotte caught my attention. In the wake of the so-called scandal around Anthony Weiner, Matlack and Marcotte give their ideas regarding some pertinent questions. Among other questions, they are asked:

Is rehab appropriate or just a way to gloss over the crime?

Seems to me that this question promotes a false dichotomy--it may very well be that rehab can help Weiner shift his behavior, but at the same time it could also be a delaying tactic, distracting all of us from the shiny object of the scandal. The way the question is posed, there is a not-so-subtle implication that either Weiner needs rehab, and is therefore somehow less culpable, or he doesn't need rehab, in which case we can more easily hold him accountable.  Whether or not one agrees with that framework, it's better to have it explicitly laid out, rather than in the background, in part because both Matlack and Marcotte are working within this framework. Matlack answers the question:

Tom: I do believe sex addiction is a real disease, not different from reliance on drugs or alcohol. It involves a complete lack of honesty and being willing to put sexual interactions above all else in your life with no regard to reason or self-preservation. I would think that Weiner fits that definition. I have no idea if rehab is the answer but the way he has been living his life sure doesn’t look like it is working out so well right now.

Why the concern about whether or not sex addiction is "a real disease"? Again, I think the implication is this: If it is somehow a real disease, then we can less easily judge Weiner for his actions, or we should at least keep in mind that there is some sense in which we might mitigate his responsibility because some of the factors regarding it are deeply physiological, and therefore very difficult for him to control. We see this sort of reasoning regarding addictions like alcohol:  Our culture has a different take on alcoholism (at times) than it did 100 years ago--we still hold drunk drivers responsible for what harm they cause while driving drunk, but we now see alcoholism as a deeper physiological problem, not simply a result of a "weak will" (at least, many of us see it that way).

I think it's good to spell some of this stuff out, even though it's probably ridiculous on some level for any of us to guess whether or not Weiner needs professional help. Matlack thinks it's clear from Weiner's poor risk assessment that he needs some sort of professional help, and I'm inclined to agree, with the caveat that it's difficult to tell.

Marcotte's take on this is more troublesome, for me. She begins her answer with:

Amanda: I don’t believe sex addiction is a real disease. I think some people might need psychological interventions for compulsive sexual behavior, but characterizing sex as addictive troubles me.

What does Marcotte's distinction between "sex addiction" and "compulsive sexual behavior" amount to? If Weiner's behavior is the result of compulsive sexual behavior, and not sex addiction, what does that mean for how we judge his behavior? What does it mean for what sort of treatment he may or may not need? Turns out, in professional circles, the jury is still very out on the whole addiction/compulsion question. Some folks think all addictions are based in compulsion, some think that there are similar mechanisms in the brain for both, and some folks think they're very different. But why is Marcotte troubled by labeling behavior as a result of addiction, rather than compulsion? She goes on to say:

Will we start calling overeaters “food addicts”? People who sleep in on Sundays “sleep addicts”?

 Well, it turns out that overeaters may well be food addicts, or at least some scientists think it's worth investigating whether or not "addiction" could be a framework for overeating.  Here's part of an abstract from a scientific paper that comes from a cursory google search:

Is it more than a linguistic accident that the same term, craving, is used to describe intense desires for both foods and for a variety of drugs of abuse? There is strong evidence for common pathways that are affected by most addictive drugs. As the other contributors to this volume will indicate, a strong case can also be made for some shared substrates for food and drug rewards in animals. There has been less explicit work on this topic in humans but many lines of evidence support the common mechanism view: Opioid peptides seem to influence food palatability for humans.

As for "sleep addiction" and "sleeping in on Sundays"--it would seem laughable to call somebody who sleeps in on Sundays a sleep addict, but what's going on in the brain of a person who sleeps 12 hours a day? How would, say, depression and anxiety relate to that person--and how is depression similar to and/or different from addiction? How is it different from or similar to compulsion? My point is that, while Marcotte's "sleeping in on Sunday" idea is made to point out the possible slippery slope of calling anything an addiction, it's also ignoring the complexities that underlie our behavior.

She continues:

At what point are we willing to say that someone is having “too many” orgasms? 

Of course, sexual addiction and/or compulsion isn't about having too many orgasms--though one can imagine, in our sex-negative culture, using the addiction/compulsion models in order to call somebody out as "sick" simply because they are having more orgasms than somebody else is comfortable with! But sexual compulsion/addiction has to do with privileging sexual arousal in a way such that the rest of one's life suffers, as Matlack notes, not about how many orgasms one has. And implying that sexual addiction/compulsion is just about having "too many orgasms" is pretty dismissive of the many folks who feel they are struggling with something serious, as well as folks who feel they have suffered because of the sexual compulsions and addictions of others.

On another point I agree a bit more with Marcotte, however.  She says:

It seems to me that we’re overrating Weiner’s willingness to put his sex life above other things. He didn’t actually have sex with these women. He mostly seemed to be sexting with them to amuse himself while working and traveling, and if he hadn’t slipped up, it seems like he would have gotten away with it.

Leaving aside for a moment the idea that sexting isn't sex (is phone sex sex? is mutual masturbation in the same bed as a partner sex? Seems to me a continuum conception is more helpful here than a binary conception), it seems possible to me that Weiner was simply doing something that lots of people do, amusing (and arousing) himself (and, possibly, others).  Leaving aside any infidelity for a moment, he may have just been having a bit of fun. I'm suspicious of that framing, however, because it ignores that Weiner was taking great risks in order to have a bit of fun, given that he is (was?) a high-profile politician. And it could be that he simply didn't think enough about the technology he was using (once you put a picture out there, it's out there forever, and traceable), but it seems more likely that he was engaging in what even he would have called risky behavior, given his job. If somebody shares my naughty sexting with the world, I might suffer for it, but most people wouldn't care. Seems to me that Weiner had to have known that this was a possible outcome, and did it anyway, which is how addictive and compulsive behaviors work, sometimes. But again: It's hard to tell, from this distance.

Finally, Marcotte notes:

 If that’s addiction, then our nation should be deeply worried about the epidemic of Angry Birds addiction.

 Well, yes. Some people are!

I would like also to note that Marcotte has a great article on Pandagon about (among other things) how condemning Weiner, in some ways, is really a kind of conservative, sex-negative, "schoolmarm" approach to sex and gender, and I agree with her wholeheartedly.  She says:

But still, this entire piece bothered me because once again it upholds an extremely conservative view of gender, where men are naughty little boys with overactive libidos and women are scolding schoolmarms whose trustworthiness is assured because we're practically asexual.  )

So: What does all of this have to do with feminism, exactly, and pro-feminist men? Well, a lot, because it is through feminist lenses that men can examine their sexuality, and hopefully develop a more positive male sexuality--one that includes all of the intricacies of our complex human sexuality, which also includes a framework for better understanding sexual addiction and/or sexual compulsion.  I think that Matlack and Marcotte's quick analysis leaves so much to the side in this regard so as to be more harmful than not offering up an opinion on Weiner at all. And I think if we go with some feminist traditions of avoiding dichotomies and examining closely the grey areas, we get a lot more insight into all of this than we do by simply guessing whether or not Weiner is a sex addict.

Male Sexuality, Continued

A while back I asked folks to chime in about positive male sexuality (and it sounded like crickets, incidentally). Here's a site that is doing some exploring of male sexuality, and it's "positive" in that questions about what is missing from male sexuality are being explicitly addressed. Check it out!

The Man Project crossposted at The Good Men Project.

Healthy Male Sexuality?

Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of Yes Means Yes, is writing a new book, and is doing a workshop related to the book, and she's asking for folks who want to participate to contact her:

When it comes to sex, should I always avoid the things that make me uncomfortable? How do I know if the person I’m flirting with is safe to date? Is hooking up always damaging? What do I say to a friend who’s making sexual choices I think might be bad for her? What if that friend is questioning my choices? How do I encourage others to be safe and sane about sex without teaching them shame?
...[b]ut before the book can reach the page, Jaclyn is looking for a dozen volunteers to be the very first people to ever read the book, engage with the exercises, discuss the process with each other and with Jaclyn, and help shape the finished book.

The books sounds fantastic. I contacted her just to verify that the book, and workshop, is about/for women- or female-identified folks, and she quickly responded that, yes, it is. No problem there: All books have to have some sort of scope, and a book about healthy female sexuality framed in the way she's framing it is a pretty wide scope already.

At the same time, male-identified folks need a book like this as well--many of the resources I find when I search "healthy male sexuality" revolve more around viagra than around complex male sexuality.

Please share any good resources all y'all know about!

I'll start. This book seems to have a gender analysis at the beginning (though it starts with a discussion of Viagra), touching on at least some of the intricacies of male sexuality: The New Male Sexuality

The Straight Guy Box

Thinking a lot about the lack of positive male sexualities, especially for straight-identified men, in part because of a recent post by Hugo.And then, I run into this funny-yet-poignant piece from Dan Savage (who I often agree with and who is often wrong) that sums up a lot of what I've been pondering: